Spatial design

Last updated

Spatial design is a relatively new conceptual design discipline that crosses the boundaries of traditional design specialisms such as architecture, landscape architecture, landscape design, interior design, urban design and service design as well as certain areas of public art.

It focuses upon the flow of people between multiple areas of interior and exterior environments and delivers value and understanding in spaces across both the private and public realm. The emphasis of the discipline is upon working with people and space, particularly looking at the notion of place, also place identity and genius loci. As such, the discipline covers a variety of scales, from detailed design of interior spaces to large regional strategies, [1] and is largely found within the UK. As a discipline, it uses the language of architecture, interior design and landscape architecture to communicate design intentions. Spatial design uses research methods often found in disciplines such as product and service design, identified by IDEO, [2] as well as social and historical methods that help with the identification and determination of place.

As a growth area of design, the number of spatial design practitioners work within existing disciplines or as independent consultants.

The subject is studied at a number of institutions within the UK [3] [4] , Denmark [5] and Switzerland [6] though, as with any new field of study, these courses differ in their scope and ambition. [7]

Ultimately it can be seen as "the glue that joins traditional built environment disciplines together with the people they are designed to serve".

During the COVID-19 pandemic, spatial design became an important aspect of reshaping collective use of urban space. [8] and thinking about access and egress. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Design</span> Plan for the construction of an object or system

A design is a concept of either an object, a process, or a system that is specific and, in most cases, detailed. Design refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, though it is sometimes used to refer to the nature of something. The verb to design expresses the process of developing a design. In some cases, the direct construction of an object without an explicit prior plan may also be considered to be a design. The design usually has to satisfy certain goals and constraints; may take into account aesthetic, functional, economic, or socio-political considerations; and is expected to interact with a certain environment. Typical examples of designs include architectural and engineering drawings, circuit diagrams, sewing patterns and less tangible artefacts such as business process models.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urban design</span> Designing and shaping of human settlements

Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban design considers 'bigger picture' issues of economic, social and environmental value and social design. The scope of a project can range from a local street or public space to an entire city and surrounding areas. Urban designers connect the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning to better organize physical space and community environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Landscape architecture</span> Design of outdoor public areas, landmarks, and structures

Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor areas, landmarks, and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioural, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic design and general engineering of various structures for construction and human use, investigation of existing social, ecological, and soil conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of other interventions that will produce desired outcomes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Built environment</span> The human-made space in which people live, work and recreate on a day-to-day basis

The term built environment refers to human-made conditions and is often used in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, public health, sociology, and anthropology, among others. These curated spaces provide the setting for human activity and were created to fulfill human desires and needs. The term can refer to a plethora of components including the traditionally associated buildings, cities, public infrastructure, transportation, open space, as well as more conceptual components like farmlands, dammed rivers, wildlife management, and even domesticated animals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Landscape ecology</span> Science of relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems

Landscape ecology is the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. This is done within a variety of landscape scales, development spatial patterns, and organizational levels of research and policy. Concisely, landscape ecology can be described as the science of "landscape diversity" as the synergetic result of biodiversity and geodiversity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urban geography</span> Subdiscipline of geography concentrating on urban areas

Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography that derives from a study of cities and urban processes. Urban geographers and urbanists examine various aspects of urban life and the built environment. Scholars, activists, and the public have participated in, studied, and critiqued flows of economic and natural resources, human and non-human bodies, patterns of development and infrastructure, political and institutional activities, governance, decay and renewal, and notions of socio-spatial inclusions, exclusions, and everyday life. Urban geography includes different other fields in geography such as the physical, social, and economic aspects of urban geography. The physical geography of urban environments is essential to understand why a town is placed in a specific area, and how the conditions in the environment play an important role with regards to whether or not the city successfully develops. Social geography examines societal and cultural values, diversity, and other conditions that relate to people in the cities. Economic geography is important to examine the economic and job flow within the urban population. These various aspects involved in studying urban geography are necessary to better understand the layout and planning involved in the development of urban environments worldwide.

Landscape archaeology, a sub-discipline of archaeology and archaeological theory, is the study of the ways in which people in the past constructed and used the environment around them. It is also known as archaeogeography. Landscape archaeology is inherently multidisciplinary in its approach to the study of culture, and is used by pre-historical, classic, and historic archaeologists. The key feature that distinguishes landscape archaeology from other archaeological approaches to sites is that there is an explicit emphasis on the sites' relationships between material culture, human alteration of land/cultural modifications to landscape, and the natural environment. The study of landscape archaeology has evolved to include how landscapes were used to create and reinforce social inequality and to announce one's social status to the community at large. The field includes with the dynamics of geohistorical objects, such as roads, walls, boundaries, trees, and land divisions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spatial planning</span> Technique for physical organisation of space

Spatial planning mediates between the respective claims on space of the state, market, and community. In so doing, three different mechanisms of involving stakeholders, integrating sectoral policies and promoting development projects mark the three schools of transformative strategy formulation, innovation action and performance in spatial planning

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urbanism</span> Study of how inhabitants of towns and cities interact with the built environment

Urbanism is the study of how inhabitants of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment. It is a direct component of disciplines such as urban planning, which is the profession focusing on the physical design and management of urban structures, and urban sociology which is the academic field the study of urban life and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LASALLE College of the Arts</span> Art school in Singapore

LASALLE College of the Arts, simply known as LASALLE, is a publicly-funded post-secondary arts institution in Singapore, and a constituent college of the University of the Arts Singapore (UAS) from 2024.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interior architecture</span> Design of a building or shelter from inside out

Interior architecture is the design of a building or shelter from inside out, or the design of a new interior for a type of home that can be fixed. It can refer to the initial design and plan used for a building's interior, to that interior's later redesign made to accommodate a changed purpose, or to the significant revision of an original design for the adaptive reuse of the shell of the building concerned. The latter is often part of sustainable architecture practices, whereby resources are conserved by "recycling" a structure through adaptive redesign.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Environmental psychology</span> Academic study of the minds relationship to ones immediate surroundings

Environmental psychology is a branch of psychology that explores the relationship between humans and the external world. It examines the way in which the natural environment and our built environments shape us as individuals. Environmental psychology emphasizes how humans change the environment and how the environment changes humans' experiences and behaviors. The field defines the term environment broadly, encompassing natural environments, social settings, built environments, learning environments, and informational environments. According to an article on APA Psychnet, environmental psychology is when a person thinks of a plan, travels to a certain place, and follows through with the plan throughout their behavior.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isovist</span>

A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point. It is a geometric concept coined by Clifford Tandy in 1967 and further refined by the architect Michael Benedikt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Placemaking</span>

Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. Placemaking capitalizes on a local community's assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that improve urban vitality and promote people's health, happiness, and well-being. It is political due to the nature of place identity. Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy that makes use of urban design principles. It can be either official and government led, or community driven grassroots tactical urbanism, such as extending sidewalks with chalk, paint, and planters, or open streets events such as Bogotá, Colombia's Ciclovía. Good placemaking makes use of underutilized space to enhance the urban experience at the pedestrian scale to build habits of locals.

Ecological design or ecodesign is an approach to designing products and services that gives special consideration to the environmental impacts of a product over its entire lifecycle. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan define it as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." Ecological design can also be defined as the process of integrating environmental considerations into design and development with the aim of reducing environmental impacts of products through their life cycle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Architecture</span> Product and process of planning, designing and constructing buildings and other structures

Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings or other structures. The term comes from Latin architectura; from Ancient Greek ἀρχιτέκτων (arkhitéktōn) 'architect'; from ἀρχι- (arkhi-) 'chief', and τέκτων (téktōn) 'creator'. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural symbols and as works of art. Historical civilizations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements.

Nils Norman is an artist living in London. He works across the disciplines of public art, architecture and urban planning. His projects challenge notions of the function of public art and the efficacy of mainstream urban planning and large-scale regeneration. Informed by local politics and ideas on alternative economic, ecological systems and play, Norman's work merges utopian alternatives with current urban design to create a humorous critique of the discrete histories and functions of public art and urban planning. Norman was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark, at the School of Walls and Space from 2009 until 2017.

Fuzzy architectural spatial analysis (FASA) (also fuzzy inference system (FIS) based architectural space analysis or fuzzy spatial analysis) is a spatial analysis method of analysing the spatial formation and architectural space intensity within any architectural organization.

Jos Boys is an architect, activist, educator, and writer. She was a founder member of Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative and co-author of their 1984 book Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Since 2008 she has been co-director of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project with disabled artist Zoe Partington, a disability-led platform that works with disabled artists to explore new ways to think about disability in architectural and design discourse and practice.

Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design is an architecture book by Roger Trancik, an educator and practitioner of urban design. The book has been translated into "simple" as well as "orthodox" Chinese translations. This book introduces the theory, vocabulary and issues of urban spatial design. It identifies and introduces the issue of ‘Lost Spaces’ that had emerged in the cities with the modern urban development and growth. The book was intended primarily for designers and students of the city. The book includes theoretical and critical discussion along with practical applications and strategies for correcting the problems of spatial structure.

References

  1. SWRA – The Draft Regional Spatial Strategy
  2. IDEO Environments Design Archived 2009-12-06 at the Wayback Machine
  3. Spatial Design: Interior & Landscape BA(Hons) - University College Falmouth
  4. BA (Hons) Spatial Design - London College of Communication, University of the Arts London Archived 2014-02-19 at the Wayback Machine
  5. Master's Programme: Spatial Design - The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Design and Conservation
  6. Bachelor Spatial Design: Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Lucerne School of Art and Design
  7. "Modern design guide". Monday, December 23, 2019
  8. Mehta, Vikas (2020-11-01). "The new proxemics: COVID-19, social distancing, and sociable space". Journal of Urban Design. 25 (6): 669–674. doi:10.1080/13574809.2020.1785283. ISSN   1357-4809. S2CID   225096639.
  9. Gueorguiev, Manol; Anagnost, Adrian (2022-07-01). "Pandemic Design: Art, Space, and Embodiment". Design Issues. 38 (3): 5–19. doi: 10.1162/desi_a_00688 . ISSN   0747-9360. S2CID   250148288.